The extraordinary survival story of Narcisse Pelletier, a young French cabin boy shipwrecked
on Cape York, Australia, in 1858

In 1858, fourteen-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, the ship stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there it set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors aboard, bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo in Australia. Off the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground.

Scrambling aboard a longboat, the survivors undertook a perilous voyage, crossing almost 1,000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of the Daintree region in far north Queensland. There, Narcisse was left for dead by his shipmates, but rescued by the local Aboriginal people, the Uutaalnganu. For seventeen years, Narcisse lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their world.

Then, in 1875 he was discovered by the crew of a pearling lugger and wrenched from his Aboriginal family. Returned to his 'real' life in France, Narcisse became a lighthouse keeper, married and had another family, all the while dreaming of what he had left behind.

Drawing on first-hand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of upheaval and transformation.